


Inferno

by the_ragnarok



Category: Person of Interest (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Afterlife, Death, Hopeful Ending, Kinda, M/M, Major Character Undeath, Torture, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-20
Updated: 2015-10-20
Packaged: 2018-04-27 07:01:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,122
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5038429
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_ragnarok/pseuds/the_ragnarok
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The boiling lake of blood isn’t so bad, really. The real kicker is the company. </p>
<p>(Or, John Reese is in hell.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Inferno

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to talktothesky for beta <33

The boiling lake of blood isn’t so bad, really. You get used to the stink, the heavy, oppressive air of metal and rot. The heat still made Reese flinch if he went too close, grit his teeth when he had to wade inside, but that too was bearable.

The real kicker was the company.

“It’s kind of fucking sexist,” Kara says, “that you’re out there and I’m in here.” She says it calmly enough that you’d never guess that she’s in up to her neck, fair skin blistering where it touches the blood.

He doesn’t answer her. He doesn’t have an answer. If needling him gives her comfort, who is he to deny her that?

Who’s in and how deep seems mostly up to chance, anyway. There are overseers, but their intervention is chancy at best. If one damned soul drags another into the lake, sometimes they’ll stop the former; other times, they’ll push the latter in. Maybe it really is sexism that kept John mostly on the shore so far. The overseers are mostly guys.

On a whim, he tells Kara, “Wanna trade?”

She looks at him. Her expression flickers, uncertain, and settles on his weapon.

Reese aims. He gets her in the head, and she goes limp. The woman next to her catches her before she collapses, stopping her from going under the surface.

Kindness takes weird forms in hell.

~~

The noises are hard, too. There’s a guy kneeling in the shallows, eyes wide, breath bubbling in and out. Reese got him in the lung. “You’re not coming out,” Reese tells him, sympathetic despite himself.

He remembers the guy’s face but not his name. Arms dealer; Reese had chased him through New York for over a month, his trail marked in drive-by shootings. Alicia Barrows, there’s a name Reese remembers: she was their first number pointing at the guy, and Reese found her dead in her sobbing mother’s arms, shot by a stray bullet.

Slowly, the guy’s breath settles, his face twists as his body heals despite itself. 

“Now go deeper,” Reese tells him, his weapon aimed, unwavering. “Go on.” He lowers his gun, suggestive. He got the guy in the kneecap when they were alive, though apparently that didn’t make him rethink his choices in life. Sometimes all the second chances in the world aren’t enough.

If he shoots someone in the leg in here, they have the choice of trying to stand up on broken bones or sinking to their knees in boiling blood. Kindness may be different in here, but cruelty looks just the same.

~~

“Hey.” It’s one of the overseers, standing behind him. Reese turns slowly, weapon still aimed at the lake. “Come with me.”

Telling the overseers  _no_  is a good way to get tossed in the deep part of the lake. Reese follows.

There’s an odd moment when the overseer seems to pinch the air, and a door opens in the scenery, leading somewhere dark and cool. Reese has a moment of vertigo as he passes through.

“Someone you love made it out of purgatory today,” the overseer says. She’s an older woman, her face lined. “We get the option to show it to you. You get the option to stay and watch.” She makes the air-pinching gesture again, and something like a video feed shows up in front of Reese.

Her voice sounds distant, miles away when she says, “I’ll leave you to it.”

Because Harold is on the screen. He’s kneeling, blood and ash falling away from his skin. Slowly he gets to his legs, and John watches as the pink ropy scars he remembers fade into healthy skin, as Harold rolls his shoulders and his neck. He can hear Harold sigh with relief, with satisfaction. Then clothes appear to cover him. One of Finch’s suits, the grey and green one. John had liked that one.

Harold looks up, and there are tears on his face, and he’s smiling. 

The image freezes. John stares at it until the overseer comes to lead him out.

~~

Reese tries not to think about it. Not too often, anyway. Hell is supposed to be for eternity, and he doesn’t want the memory to wear out.

He does let himself admit, now, that he worried. He’d never read Dante, but there was a book in the library, a thin old paperback about a science fiction writer moving through the circles of hell. He kept thinking about the place where false advisors go, for some reason, though he doesn’t remember what happened to them.

The fate of traitors is something Reese remembers, buried in ice. Here amidst the boiling blood, it frankly sounds like a relief. And there was something - what was the one with the lizards? It was so  _odd,_ you got turned into a lizard and had to bite someone to become human again. “What’s so bad about being a lizard?” Reese wonders aloud.

“I believe it’s an issue of status,” a voice says behind him. “The mere fate of becoming a lizard isn’t the true horror, but constantly knowing you could be turned into one against your will, and fearing it. The kind of people who inhabit that circle would never rest until they’ve inflicted their own fate on others. It’s their nature that makes it hellish, more than the experience itself.”

He turns slowly. There Harold is, now in a suit with purple stripe, not a stitch of it out of place. “Harold,” he says, voice gone rusty, shaky. “You were in heaven. You were  _safe_." 

Harold’s eyes have a quality of kindness that John forgot existed. "If I couldn’t leave when I chose, it wouldn’t be heaven, it would be a prison.”

“And you chose to come  _here_?” He recognizes the quiver in his voice now: it’s rage, fitting this place.

“It’s where you are,” Harold says, quirking his eyebrows. “Anyway, you can’t imagine I propose we’d stay here.” His shoulders tense, the first hint of discomfort since John saw him. 

A beat, and then John says, “I can’t come with you.” He sees Harold narrowing his eyes, preparing to argue, and adds, “How the fuck are you planning on getting  _me_  into heaven?”

“Why, the same way I got there,” Harold says. “The hard way. The long way. To go out, one must go through: I thought you remembered that.”

John’s gun falls from his nerveless hands to the ground. He should take it with him, if he goes, to protect Harold. His hands, blistered with splashes from the lake, refuse to lift the weapon.

Harold reaches out for him, and John’s hand lifts to his, unbidden. “Come now, John.” His voice is so incongruously gentle. “I know the way. Let’s go.” 

**Author's Note:**

> This was inspired by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's Inferno, and might be considered a fusion of sorts.


End file.
